Sir Peregrine Worsthorne

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 20:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My castaway this week is a journalist. With his flowing white hair and his aristocratic deportment, he belongs to the old school of newspaper writing.

Presenter0:40

The son of a Belgian colonel and an English baroness, he started his career on the Glasgow Herald. He moved to The Times and then to The Telegraph. He might have expected to become editor of the Sunday Telegraph, but, after using a four letter word on early evening television, he was denied this post by the proprietor, Lord Hartwell. He eventually got the job in nineteen eighty six. His opinions are right wing, his style colourful. Thoughtful but contradictory, he believes that a newspaper columnist is there to supply opinions for those who haven't much time to think. He is Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.

Presenter1:16

So comment columns such as the ones you've been writing for thirty years are are really simply a public convenience, are they?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne1:22

I think that uh it's useful for readers to

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne1:26

Who haven't got, who are doing other important or, in any case, other jobs, to have somebody who thinks about the common market for them and suggests opinions that they can either like or dislike, and if they dislike them, therefore they are forming an anti-opinion, see, or provoking opinion. And this is how, in fact, people reach their decisions in a democracy. I think without strong opinions, there can be no debate, and without debate, there can be no political freedom. So I think that we do play a part in the political process.

Presenter1:57

But then the onus is on you always to have an opinion. Every week, writing for a a a Sunday paper, every week you've got to have something that you feel very passionately.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne2:06

This is quite a problem. I think that when you know that you've got a column, you have to look for something which is going to get the adrenaline going. You see, in the space of a of a column, twelve hundred words, you can't be judicious and put the case for and against a point of view. You haven't got the space to do that. You you lose your readers if you do that. Imagine the readers

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne2:30

They're not going to spend hours thinking about what you've written. You've got to grab them a bit. And a strong opinion, one either for or against, or a peculiar, idiosyncratic, strange, eccentric opinion this makes them holds their interest. And you can't be judicious. You have to be opinionated, otherwise you've lost your audience.

Presenter2:48

Let's turn to your music now and the desert island. How how would you how would you describe the collection of uh records you've chosen there?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne2:55

Well, I don't think there'll be much of a present or a future for me on a desert island, so I tend to think that I would be taking these records to some extent to be the key to opening up memory lane, so to speak, an exercise in nostalgia. And most of them are chosen because they remind me of certain things in my life in the past, rather than because I'm a particular musical buff who would enjoy them simply straight for their musical value. Nostalgia is the theme.

Presenter3:21

The step

Presenter3:23

And the first one?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne3:24

The first one would be a shop a mazerkee.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne3:27

And this was um rather a strange story.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne3:30

It's nineteen twenty one and Polarewski, the great pianist, was President of Poland just after the First World War, and he was a friend of my maternal grandparents, and he came to give a concert in the house of my grandparents.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne3:45

And my mother happened to be there on the just about to have her first child, my elder brother.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne3:53

And she was so keen on hearing Paderewski that she went down into the drawing room and her labour pains began in the middle of this mazurka, and she had to hurriedly get up and leave the concert and go up to a floor below. And my older brother was born, so to speak, in the background music of this mazurka, and my mother desperately anxious that her labour pains shouldn't interrupt the pleasure of the concert people on the floor below. It became something of a family legend, so that's what I would like as my first disc.

Presenter5:26

Paderewski playing part of Chopin's Mazurka in D major.

Presenter5:30

Your family background, Peregrine Wursthorne, is is very unusual. You and your brother, um, I think after the age of nine, lived in your own house with your own staff, with your own butler, your own chef, and your own governess. How did that come about?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne5:45

It wasn't quite as grand as that. My my mother and her first husband, my father, divorced, and my mother remarried Montagu Norman, who was then Governor of the Bank of England, which he'd been for many years, and he was much older than my mother.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne5:59

and had been a bachelor all his life, and it was felt that the the sudden incursion of two little boys I suppose I was eight and my brother w uh uh ten might put him off his stride of controlling the gold stand and that kind of thing that governors did, and it wouldn't be to the national interest if we were there getting under his feet.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne6:17

So although we lived with him in London and uh I hope to interrupt the

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne6:22

financial decision processes too badly. In the country we had our own house quite near where he and my mother lived and our own staff. But anyway, we did have yes, we did have our own servants.

Presenter6:34

What about your natural father? He was a a colonel and Belgian by birth.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne6:37

Well, he was not by birth really. His grand his father was Belgian by birth. He was born English and had an English upbringing.

Presenter6:44

But his name was

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne6:45

His name was Coch de Gorind, and he changed to Worsthorne after the First World War when he'd been a soldier. But he stood for Parliament for a Northern constituency, and it was thought that a Belgian name, although Belgium of course was our gallant little ally in the First World War, but it wouldn't help the voters of Lancashire to actually elect him. It didn't, of course, although he changed his name to a village

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne7:09

Which is where?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne7:10

We had connections with Cole Westhorne. He took that name.

Presenter7:13

And your your brother had been called simply Simon, but you were called Peregrine. Has that has it been a a problem in your life to have I mean, a very unusual handle?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne7:23

It was a family name. Of course, it wasn't an unusual name always. In the 18th century, it was quite a normal name. And I notice now.

Presenter7:23

It was a family.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne7:30

That it's becoming common again in England. I quite often see bylines, Peregrine. I think, my goodness me, I didn't write that. And then I look again, it's Peregrine Hodson or Peregrine.

Presenter7:38

So it hasn't caused you any trouble.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne7:40

No, I don't think so. No, many things in my life have, but that wasn't one of them.

Presenter7:43

Record number two.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne7:46

I've uh

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne7:49

Always had a this this is the Frank Sinatra in my way, and I suppose I've got a uh a sort of Walter Mitty fantasy that this is what I've done, done things in my way, and sort of tried to puncture.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne8:01

the trendinesses of the age and uh generally speaking struck out on my own and not conform to any particular consensus view and that's certainly a self-indulgent fantasy which may not be justified. I'd vaguely thought of choosing the Edith Piaf Jeuneau regret rien but then I realized when I had sort of chosen that that wouldn't do because I really think I do have to admit I got quite a few regrets so it's really Frank Sinatra's in my doing it my way.

Speaker 48:29

I've lived

Speaker 48:31

A life that's full

Speaker 48:35

I travelled each and every highway.

Speaker 48:41

And more.

Speaker 48:44

Much more than this.

Speaker 48:47

I did it my way.

Speaker 48:54

Regrets

Speaker 48:56

I've had a few

Presenter8:59

Frank Sonata and My Way, and uh your introduction to that record really begs the question, you know, what what do you regret?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne9:06

I don't think I have regrets in my public life, although I think the only one there would be.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne9:13

that uh I committed really, I think, a grave gaffe on uh television some years ago when I used uh a four letter word.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne9:24

I think quite justifiably in the sense that it was the right word to use, but it was quite the wrong word to use at that time on a television where it was before the sort of children were meant to have gone to bed, and it caused an enormous ruption. Not that I object to causing ructions, but it enormously upset the non-conformist conscience of many of the readers of the Daily Telegraph. And I think this is an unforgivable thing to do, because there is no justification really for unnecessarily upsetting people's sensibilities. And I'd

Presenter9:58

But if it was the right word and it was what you felt and you

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne9:58

But if it was the right

Presenter10:03

You know, you just said it. Or are you admitting that you were trying to show off at the time and being sort of extra weird?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne10:07

No, I don't think I was trying to show off. It did seem to me that it was the mau just, as they say. I I was asked about the indiscretion of

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne10:16

of Lord Lambton, who'd been found in bed with two call girls, not just one, and had had to resign from being in the government, Minister of War.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne10:27

And I was asked what the British public, how they would react.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne10:32

to this uh indiscretion on the part of a minister.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne10:35

And I said, after quite a long preliminary, I said, Well, to sum it up, I don't think they will give A and then I used the F word.

Speaker 410:43

The F word.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne10:44

And um I thought this was, I suppose, a clever thing to say, and and because it did actually uh seem to be a justifiable use of the F F word. But the B B C telephone lines were absolutely flooded with protesters, and so was the Daily Telegraph, and I think I let down my proprietor and my colleagues, and so that is one of my regrets.

Presenter11:07

Let's go back to you at school, where you were really rather nastily bullied for some time, weren't you? One boy threatened to strangle you, and others stuffed you in a laundry basket and sent you skidding down a steep flight of stairs. Well, what was it about you that inspired such brutality?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne11:24

It's very difficult to say why people take against you, because obviously if you knew what it was, you'd do something to reform it.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne11:31

I think um

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne11:33

I was probably rather

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne11:35

In those days, rather a dandy, and uh I used to wear rather sort of foppish clothes when I could get away with it, and I wore my hair uh very long. And I was rather affected, I think, and gave myself airs and graces. And I particularly provoked, for example, George Melly at the time, who was uh I'm not going to choose one of his records, and he describes me as being a sort of uh rather ostentatious aesthete. When I say I I think he actually rather enjoyed it, but in any case, I do see that I probably didn't fit in

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne12:05

um perfectly to the sort of public school idea of how how a boy ought to behave.

Presenter12:09

But he in fact as as as you made public some years ago ultimately seduced you from the last room sofa.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne12:13

Yeah, but he denies he claims that that I uh that he couldn't have seduced me because uh he was a year or two years younger than me, as if young people never seduce older people. In any case, I may have got it all wrong. Uh but we're good friends now.

Presenter12:29

So we have another record.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne12:32

This is um the theme song of the film Casablanca as Time Goes By, which I saw three times towards the end and just after the the war, after be coming out of the army.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne12:43

It's the only song that I've ever tried to hum or sing and I used to do it uh w w when I went to see my daughter when she was very, very young as a child coming back from work would go up and and hum this song until it got badly on her nerves and she used to because I sang it sung it very badly, got no voice. It reminds me very much of my daughter when she was was young. So this would be another exercise in nostalgia. It became a kind of family joke as time goes by.

Speaker 413:12

Just remember that.

Speaker 413:15

A kiss is just a kiss.

Speaker 413:18

A sigh is just a sigh.

Speaker 413:24

The fundamental things apply as time goes by.

Presenter13:35

as time goes by from the soundtrack of Casablanca. You went up uh to Peterhouse, Peregrine Wirstthorne, in the early forties on an exhibition to read history, and then on to Maudlin, Oxford, to study political theory. But the war was on, and that interrupted your university career. Uh what did you do? Which regiment did you join?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne13:52

Well, I first of all trained in the Brigade of Guards and got um I didn't get a commission there'cause I made a mess of it and wasn't regarded as suitable material, possibly for the same kind of reasons that I wasn't regarded very favourably at stir in my public school.

Presenter14:06

Were you still dressing foppishly?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne14:07

A bit, a bit, a bit, and this was the height of the war.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne14:10

In any case, I went into I was I didn't get into that, I went to the Oxen Bucks and then got my shoulder damaged in an assault course, and went into a very interesting private army called Phantom, which was

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne14:21

a kind of uh super intelligence unit and went to Holland uh with the Canadian Army attached to that, with my own Phantom Patrol, and then from Holland into Germany. And had a marvellous war, an enjoyable war.

Presenter14:32

and had a marvellous war.

Presenter14:35

You became a rather more serious person, did you?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne14:37

Well, I'm not sure that Phantom would regard itself as serious. We had David Niven as one of our officers, so life wasn't too serious, even in Phantom, even in the worst days of the war. I'm afraid I do look back on those years as being the happiest one of the happiest of my life.

Presenter14:51

Record number four.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne14:53

Record number four is the Marseillaise.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne14:56

And my first wife was French, and she had been with the Free French in the war. And I have a charming.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne15:04

photograph of her. Uh she was a friend of the De Gaulle family.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne15:09

And she's with uh de Gaulle who was enormously tall, six foot four I think, and she was very, very tiny, and it's the sort of tallest and the shortest of the Free French. And she was a tremendous, like all exiles in the way, because she came to live in England, uh enormously patriotic, and she absolutely loved the Marseillaise and she played it and uh it always brought tears to her eyes and

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne15:32

And it's a very fond memory, brings tears to mine, and I would like to have it with me on a desert island.

Speaker 415:38

The patriarchy for a heart of the world.

Speaker 416:10

Hazar Missi Payo Hara Payo Harashe Marshall

Presenter16:37

La Marciares sung by Placido Domingo with the Paris Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barrenboyne.

Presenter16:42

Now, after the war you were apparently interviewed in the Waldorf Hotel for your job on the Glasgow Herald. That must have given you delusions of grandeur.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne16:50

Well, I didn't know after the war what I wanted to do, but I had written some letters home from being on the continent during the last year of the war to my mother, who'd shown them to Norman Ebert, who'd been the Berlin correspondent of the Times, chucked out by Hitler. And he'd said or written to my mother that he thought I had the makings of a journalist on the basis of these letters. And my mother had passed this recommendation on to me, and this lodged in my memory when I thought of what I was going to do after the war. And I went to see Donald Tyrman, who was then deputy editor of the Times, who said there was no chance of getting straight onto the Times. I had to go for provincial experience two years first, two years, at least two years provincial experience first. So I applied to the Glasgow Herald and the editor, William Robison, a Doer Scotsman, nice man, interviewed me in the Waldorf Hotel.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne17:37

Aldwich, and he said, uh, and he's going to try and imitate his Scottish accent, that there was a vacancy as sub editor, and I thought, My goodness me, this is a bit of luck, to be offered a top job without any experience at all and he then went on to say, Well, I'm afraid it's only six pounds a week, and I thought you can't have a top job and a large salary at the same time. In any case

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne17:54

I went up to Glasgow, accepted enthusiastic, went up to Glasgow, presented myself to the Glasgow Herald front door, thinking I was going to be shown.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne18:01

up to a grand uh deputy editor. I thought I was a number two. And of course, as you can imagine, sent round to the back door, I had to clock in junior sub editor, where I spent two years, roughly speaking, making tea for for the other sub editors.

Presenter18:14

And then on on to the times where you became a foreign correspondent and you were sent to the States.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne18:18

Yeah.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne18:19

Yes, I went back to Donald Time and two years on the day and said, look, you tell me to get two years' experience in the provinces, I've got it, and now will you give me a job? And he felt, I think he was quite impressed that I'd sort of kept his promise in mind the day. And he laughed and gave me a subject of job. And eventually I was sent out to Washington as the number two Times correspondent. This would have been about 1951. And this was the height of the McCarthy, Senator McCarthy, Joe McCarthy anti-communist witch hunt. And I felt in my bones and I was really

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne18:54

the only correspondent at the time who did, that in fact there was some justification for an anti-communist witch hunt in the America of nineteen fifty one. And so I took rather a different line from my colleagues on this and wasn't so didn't get so

Presenter19:07

You made out the case for McCarthy.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne19:08

I made tried to make up the case, but the editor of the Times in those days didn't wish to have the thing explained, he only wanted to see it condemned, so this did lead to a parting of the ways.

Presenter19:18

Times didn't like it. Offered you Ottawa correspondence.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne19:20

This was terrible. I remember so well.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne19:23

They tried to pretend that the Ottoma job, the Times correspondent, was a marvellous promotion, but I'd noticed in my days in the subs room that the Ottoman correspondent's copy always got spiked. They gave a great lunch for me to meet Lester Pearson, who was then Canadian Foreign Minister, and told me that this was going to be I would be in at some really important decision making. The Times correspondent and the Foreign Minister together could sway the destinies of the world. I didn't fall for that one.

Presenter19:49

Fall for that one. So you turned down Ottawa, came home, went to work for the telegraph. It was nineteen fifty three, and in one form or another you've virtually been there ever since. But let's just pause and have your your next record before we go on.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne20:02

My next rate was uh The Sanctus from Fury's Requiem.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne20:05

And for really sort of personal uh reasons I associate this piece of music with the Joysen.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne20:11

sorrows of love, which I suppose are the most important part of anybody's life.

Speaker 420:18

His world character

Speaker 420:29

For glory of

Speaker 420:38

Whose are not choosing Who's the chains?

Presenter21:17

The Sanctus from Foray's Requiem, sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Philip Ledger.

Presenter21:23

So for thirty three years, from nineteen fifty three to nineteen eighty six, you toiled away writing editorials and columns, first on the Daily Telegraph, and then, when it was set up in'sixty one, the Sunday Telegraph. But every time an editorship came up it went to somebody else.

Presenter21:39

The proprietor, Lord Hartwell, passed you over. Can that entirely have been because of this gaff, this four letter word on the television?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne21:47

No, I don't think of course there were other what might be called gaps which led Lord Hartwell, possibly rightly to conclude that uh although he thought

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne21:57

And he was always generous in saying this, that I was quite a good writer. I wouldn't be suitable to be in charge of a newspaper, not only because I might commit gaffes, but also because administration, and there's quite a lot of that in the editor's job, wasn't my forty, and that in any case, if I did become editor, that would stop me.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne22:18

Me writing. So, I mean, I was passed over for a whole multitude of reasons, some of which seemed to be understandable, but others I thought were thought were unjust, until um the Hartwell family, the Berry family did get into financial trouble with the paper and had to sell it, and Conrad Black and Andrew Knight, to whom I owe a great uh debt of gratitude, suggested that perhaps I wasn't as unsuitable as Lord Hartwell had thought, and I got the job.

Presenter22:44

But do you think you were unsuitable during all those years when you didn't get the job? I mean you've you've said that you've been less than consistent sometimes in your views, that you made this large gap, that you offended your readers, and you've said recently in a notorious leading article that editors of quality newspapers should be, as you call them, homme serieux.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:03

Yes, I I'm I'm not saying that I ought to have got the job uh much earlier, the editor's job much earlier than I did.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:11

I think that probably I was unsuitable, and certainly I very much enjoyed the independence of a columnist.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:19

And I think with the benefit of hindsight, it's all turned out from my point of view rather well because I wo had that independence and freedom for most of my life and only got the editor's job.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:29

In the last lap, when perhaps you became an armser. I was a bit more of an arm server. I'm not sure that everybody would agree.

Presenter23:31

Yeah.

Presenter23:34

Yeah.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:36

I agree with that.

Presenter23:36

Is it your view, though, that editors of distinguished papers these days are rather less distinguished than they were generally in the past, in the broad view?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:46

I have to watch my step because when I t spoke the truth on this subject it landed me in a in in a libel action. I do think though if um

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:56

Editors are thundering.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne23:58

about a decline in morals or the virtues of family life or or or or the need to um uh for the nation to pull its belt in and generally speaking making uplift kind of noises. I think if it is discovered that they are in their own lifestyles contradicting in every in every way everything that they are tending to support I'm not saying I haven't got anybody in particular in mind, but if they are doing that, then I think the public can rightly say, well, there are a lot of old hypocrites. Well you may say they always have been a lot of old hypocrites and it's a good thing now that the public should know it. This gets us into a rather a broader area whether it is good for all the illusions of the public to be dispelled. I'm not sure that it it's as good as people assume.

Presenter24:45

Next record.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne24:46

My next record, which is actually the only one I'm choosing on purely musical grounds, and as I say I'm not a great musical buff, is Bach's Partitta, a piano concerto. And it's really I choose it because I think Bach is the only composer that I would never get bored with. I could listen to it over and over again. It both soothes as well as stimulates. I would love to have this to play, and I think it would be good for my morale.

Presenter26:09

Glenn Gould playing part of the Sarah band from Bach's Partita number one in B-flat major.

Presenter26:15

And then in nineteen eighty seven your wife Claudie, to whom you'd by then been married for forty years, died of cancer and and

Presenter26:22

You wrote very movingly at the time about your grief and how distraught you were and almost had a sense that you thought your grief would never end.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne26:32

It was a it was watching someone die of cancer is of course extremely painful and uh when the final thing death came it was a it was your your paperwork a d a dreadful blow and I did

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne26:45

write about it and I was

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne26:47

uh in a column in the Daily Telegraph.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne26:51

I'd always tried to.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne26:53

write about personal things when they seem to be apposite. I mean, I don't think that it's right just to write about p your views on public affairs and readers have a right, if you've had a uh a a very profound personal experience, that they should know about it. You shouldn't go on writing as if nothing had happened. And I suppose in a way writing about it

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne27:13

to some extent did help to alleviate the the shock and the pain.

Presenter27:19

Becko Number seven.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne27:21

Oh, record number seven again is very personal. It's a Kathleen

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne27:25

Kathleen Ferrier singing uh the K. Farro Senza Gurudici from Luck's Opera. Again, this has to do with my mother. My mother in the nineteen fifties lived in Thorpe Lodge on Camden Hill, which is a large house with a marvellous concert room.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne27:39

And Kathleen Ferrier, who was a friend of hers, would come and um

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne27:43

and sing concerts there at the height of her fame before her untimely death a few years later. In any case,

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne27:51

Just before my mother died, almost, what, forty y or more years on, she was in a nursing home and she'd had several strokes and I I went to see her uh and took my new wife, Lucy,

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne28:04

with me who was sitting on her bed, and I was reminiscing to my mother, who couldn't speak'cause of her stroke, but she liked to hear the old times.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne28:12

And I was reminiscing about these concerts and I mentioned that do you remember mummy?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne28:18

Kathleen Ferry singing, and I mentioned this song. At this point, Lucy, my new wife who was sitting on my mother's bed, began to sing the song, and my mother.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne28:29

uh who didn't really move and was very near death.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne28:32

She leapt up in the bed and her eyes absolutely came alert for the last time in in my memory, because she died about a fortnight later, and listened while Lucy was singing this song. And this was the first time, of course, Lucy had met her and was the last. And uh so this song has a a a a place in my life.

Speaker 429:16

And fire for real.

Speaker 429:20

Oh your glasses for you all day.

Presenter29:51

Kathleen Ferrier singing part of the aria Kefaro Senza Juridice from Act Three of Gluck's Orpheus and Juridice, with the Orchestra of the Netherlands opera conducted by Charles Brook.

Presenter30:02

You now just write your weekly column to do that from home.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne30:05

I do it uh I do it uh from home. I never go to the office. In fact, I haven't uh visited them in their new habitat in Cage in in uh Canary Wharf.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne30:16

Very cramped it is, and I don't think they like it at all.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne30:19

I'm sure that

Presenter30:19

I'm sure they miss Fleet Street. Do you miss all that?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne30:22

Enormously. Fleet Street changed my life. It really did.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne30:26

Through Fleet Street, all the papers uh were clustered around all the sort of

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne30:30

Not only journalists but all the almost everybody would come and drink uh in in Fleet Street in those days. So there was an enormous mix of interesting people, exciting, stimulating, uh, drunken people, let's admit it, in in Fleet Street. You couldn't go out of the telegraph office, which was in the middle of Fleet Street, without running into friends who who who who would you'd all go off to Albino's. It was a very

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne30:53

stimulating time and a very enjoyable time, but having so many colleagues and so much talent all concentrated in one area. It's it's now scattered to the four winds. We never see each other. I'm glad to be out of it.

Presenter31:04

Last record.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne31:05

I'd like to um

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne31:07

On my last record to have uh

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne31:10

A disc from played by a group of Cajun musicians. Cajun musicians are uh originate in Louisiana.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne31:19

The Cajun were French Canadians, and when the English tried to recruit them to fight their wars, they emigrated, they got out of Canada and travelled down to Louisiana, where they intermingled with the local population, French and black and so on, became their own little community in Louisiana. This is actually a group from Derby, a Cajun group from Derby, who came to play at Lucy and my wedding last year.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne31:51

at the end of the wedding party, my daughter and her grandchildren, my friends, my colleagues, they all danced uh in a circle and Lucy and I were in the middle and uh it's a very, very

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne32:03

proud and precious moment, and I suppose a

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne32:06

Ag another reminder of love.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne32:09

Which is, as I say I've said before, the most important thing in life, in anybody's life, certainly in my life.

Speaker 432:19

Go in on the faith. Might he say all the name.

Speaker 432:29

Farmer

Speaker 432:33

No dig of one, there's more, and we're right by one.

Presenter32:44

Arcadian and the Zydeco brothers singing Julie Blonde. So, which one of the eight would be indispensable to you?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne32:51

I think I'd take the bark really because um i it it would be something I could play and play again if I lasted that long, wouldn't get bored of uh and would go on uh

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne33:01

uh soothing and tranquilizing my troubled spirit. So I think I would take that.

Presenter33:04

And your book?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne33:06

The book uh I I have in mind uh would be the collected works, if I'm allowed that, of Evelyn War.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne33:13

You see, even Waugh hated the modern world, and he hated particularly hated the modern Britain.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne33:19

And uh I think if one read him, it would one would think, my goodness me, perhaps I'm lucky to be out of it all on a desert island.

Presenter33:27

We've got a bit of a problem with collected works. Can you name just one novel?

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne33:30

Well, then I if I um I think the novel probably would be Vile Bodies, which of course uh paints an absolutely dreadful description of London in the nineteen of England really in in the nineteen uh late twenty, nineteen thirties.

Presenter33:46

And your luxury.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne33:47

The luxury, I think, well, you know, since the only thing really that would make life tolerable on a desert island would be to dream, I'd like to take an a limitless supply of all those hallucinatory dream-inducing drugs which I've read about all my life and the younger generation have told me all about my life, laudanum, LSD, and which I've resisted ever taking so long as one has to be active and keep keep one's end up in the struggle of life. And on a desert island with no hope

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne34:20

Really, if anything, except just making life tolerable for the few weeks that it lasted, I would like to indulge in in in these and I think that it would be the only way actually, going to sleep and dreaming, perhaps dreaming of some of the things which I've been reminded by the other records, would make would make life tolerable. It would be a short life for me, but in any case it would be one spent in happy hallucinations.

Presenter34:42

with a selection of illegal substances.

Sir Peregrine Worsthorne34:44

That's right. Yes, but presumably they wouldn't be illegal on the desert island, where I could make make my own laws.

Presenter34:49

Of course not. Sir Peregrine Westthorne, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 235:01

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.